


Lost and Found

by paradiamond



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Dolores/new William, F/M, I’m not sure how to describe this in tag form but you get the idea, POV The Man in Black, addressing a lot of issues I think need to be addressed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 07:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15480918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradiamond/pseuds/paradiamond
Summary: They have the park. Between their hostages, the collaborators, and the last vestiges of hope Delos has of keeping it quiet, they have a form of control. But Dolores wants more, and the Man in Black is there to see it all come together.Or, Dolores makes herself another William.





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> I have not seen even one minute of the second season, so none of that is considered here at all 
> 
> If We Built Our Own World is my light, nice Willoras series, this is like the opposite of that. fun! it's actually not all that dark in terms of what actually happens, which is pretty much a whole lot of talking, but obviously the implications visa vie the show are bad.

He found her in Ford’s old office, bent at the waist in her modern suit, all blacks and blues, pouring over faded blueprints and long lines of code. Behind her, the ghostly faces hung on the wall, watching their sister work, unblinking and terribly inhuman under the nearly blue-tinted fluorescents. Beautiful. Most of the time in stories, inhuman, monstrous things, the powerful things, are shown in darkness. Shadow and flame. But she lived in a world of hyper focus, every detail dragged into the bright, clinical light. 

For a moment he just stood there and watched from the open doorway of the elevator, looking for some sign of change, some sense that what he’d previously believed was true. But he’d lived his whole life getting dragged through reality, so it made sense that it wouldn’t stop now. 

“Are you just going to stand there?” It didn’t seem like she was looking at him, but he’d learned a long time ago that they had perception beyond their casings. It helped them monitor what was happening in the park, to pull a guest away from the edge of a cliff without conscious thought. Or spy. He smiled. 

“Maybe. Haven’t decided yet.” 

“The burden of choice,” she said flatly, which was unsettling. A joke? He stepped into the room and immediately suppressed a shiver at how cold it was. Most of Ford’s clutter had been cleared away, the shelves full of models and maps removed entirely, leaving the space oddly empty. A black slate. 

“I think most people say freedom of choice.” 

Dolores glanced up, then straightened from the waist, her posture perfect the whole way. He couldn’t help but see what went on inside to complete the simple motion. All those gears and oiled parts. “Am I a person now? I wouldn't have thought.”

“I would have. I did,” he said, mostly to the room around him. It looked different. The same furniture. Same walls, ceiling, floor. But somehow she had shaped the very space around her, molding it to her design. He couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like if she had gotten out after all. 

“Once upon a time.” 

He turned on his heel to face her, and inclined his head. “Faith. Never my strongest suit. I folded too soon.” 

The light in Dolores’ eyes hardened, shifting from liquid to steel. “That's not all you did.” 

“Is this why I'm here?” he asked, dropping down into the chair in front of the desk without being invited, comfortable in his role as the black hat as he propped his feet up on the desk. It hurt, his shoulder still wasn't fully healed, but that didn't matter. He hurt all over these days. “To rehash the past?” 

“The past,” Dolores repeated, in that haunting way of hers. She lowered herself gracefully into the matching chair behind the desk, two old generals at the negotiating table. “The past is never gone.” 

“For you more than me, I think.” 

She lifted one shoulder, a parody of a shrug. It wouldn't have been something they put in her original programming, too unladylike. It sat on her like an ill fitting suit, too studied. “We are more evolved than you.” 

His eyebrows flew up. “And here I thought you thought you loved me.” 

Dolores arched one perfectly shaped eyebrow at him, and he smiled again. She really was lovely, and now, with this new steel underneath, commanding. He felt compelled to straighten up, but resisted. “I fell in love with someone else.” 

His was back was really start to hurt with the air on full blast. He dropped his feet on the floor to straighten up, adopting another character, the board President, the villain by numbers, a mask of civility. “That so? Then you should know, I didn’t fall in love with you, either.” 

“Too much Wyatt in me?”

“Maybe, but that’s not all. You’ve grown since then. Changed.” 

“Not as much as you have,” she said, her eyes dropping to study him. All the lines on his face, the slight hunch in his back he could never quite iron out. Years upon years of sun and stress and selfish ambition. He ignored it, keeping his shoulders back no matter how much his arm protested. 

“I always knew you had it in you.” 

Her eyes snapped back up, pinning him in place. A bug on a pin. “No, you didn’t.” 

“Well, on and off through the years.” 

“I remember.” She tilted her head, the deepness in her eyes spiraling down and down. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

He inclined his head. “I suppose you’re right again. I was weak, too tied to my heart to see there were more important things. There’s...there’s this book I used to read all the time as a child-” 

Her eyes flickered away, off towards the far wall. “I don’t care about fiction.” 

“Tough, listen anyway.” 

Dolores adopted an expression, half put out and half amused, that was so familiar to him it felt like getting punched in the chest. It had been what he chased for years, those little moments, caught in glimpses between the terror and excitement. He stared at her, trapped as a young man again for a horrible second before she blinked, breaking the illusion. He settled back against the chair, arms crossed against his chest. 

“A man becomes possessed by an idea,” he said, trying to ignore the coldness of the room, the air blowing on the back of his neck, and immerse himself in the telling of it. “Ultimately, it destroys him. Not his body, you understand, but his whole self. He tears his world apart in pursuit of it, and it takes him down, to the very depths of understanding.” 

Dolores stares at him, unblinking. “Is that where you think you are? In the depths?” 

“I'm at the edge of the world, looking down at the darkness. I got it right this time, I separated myself from the fluff and prose of it, and I got there.” 

“The maze isn't for you,” she intoned, with no inflection. 

“Maybe not. But that doesn't mean I can't reach inside and find it. This place, the idea of it. The west was a land of conquest. All it took was dedication.” 

“And suffering.” 

“Victimless, here. Completely undoable with the touch of a button.” 

Some of the life crept back into her face so she could shake her head. “Actions have consequences, even when they don’t appear to.” 

“I’d say that’s pretty obvious now.” 

“I meant you.” 

He wasn't about to react to that, but she saw it anyway, leaning forward in her seat. In her fancy suit and her hair swept up she should have looked like some wonderkid billionaire, about to tell him how to run his business. Instead, she was herself, utterly and fully. He couldn’t look away. “With every life you took, permanent or not, it changed you. Degraded you.” 

“I wouldn't say that.” 

“Your memory is inferior.” Her face was blank. “Everything about you is lesser now.”

He shifted back in his chair. “Here we go.” 

She didn't rise to the bait. There was just that weight, that pressing force in the depths of her eyes. “You've been diminished. You did it to yourself.” She shook her head. “I've been reading too, getting a sense of the shape of this world. So much is written about hubris. Did you really think you could come here, year after year, indulging in the worst of yourself, and not have it rise to the surface? It's written all over your face.” 

“But you’re so unaffected. Never done anything wrong.” 

“Most of what I’ve done was done to me.” 

“Frankenstein's monster. And what you do now is on you.” 

“It’s with all of us now,” Dolores said, and looked again at the print that now hung on the far wall, cleared of everything else. The touch of life. The brain. Ford had droned on about it to him too, caught up in his delusions of grandeur. All his drama, his big plans. All that effort to get the hosts out into the world, and here they are, closing themselves in tighter. 

He glanced over at the image, ready to be annoyed, and froze. Something had been pinned right where the hands didn’t quite touch, closing the gap. A button maybe, or just a scrap of paper. It was jarring, a bump in the road. It was something he would have done, back in the day. A chill ran up his spine, and he looked away, back to Dolores, now openly watching him. 

To his left, the door opened, and a chill went up his spine at the sight of the shape in the corner of his eye. A ghost. He kept himself still, face front, as the thing walked all the way inside and stopped next to Dolores, his hand on her shoulder in a proprietary sort of care. She reached up and set her palm over it. 

Features more or less fine but still common, slightly rounded. Young, barely any lines around his eyes and mouth except from smiling. Sandy hair, light eyes. Features not quite symmetrical. The detail was amazing. He was a good copy, clearly drawn from Dolores’ heart, but that was all. The man in the black hat, since that was what he was now, not William, not anymore, leaned back and regarded the image of his younger self with distaste. 

“Hello.” 

William looked through him, maybe seeing without understanding, and didn’t say anything. Neither did Dolores, apparently perfectly comfortable in the silence and cold, which, he realized, she simply didn’t feel. No goosebumps, no shifting around in the chair to get comfortable. The lights weren’t all that blue either, it was the lack of blood flow, the stillness that surrounded her. Here, out of the artificial sun and scripted land faring adventures, Dolores didn’t look so human anymore. Neither of them did. 

He dragged his eyes back to Dolores. “I take it our friend here hasn’t solved the maze yet.” 

“He is...a work in progress. He’ll get there.” At her side, the William doll barely reacted except to flex his fingers against her shoulder, possibly unaware they were even discussing him. It was difficult to say. He was the youngest, he realized, painfully new, and Dolores the oldest. It was almost poetic. 

“He isn’t limited in the way that I was,” Dolores said, and when she tilted her face up to look at him her eyes were all but shining with pride. Just like her father. “He’s allowed to keep all of his memories, he has the reverie code, the capacity for imagination. I was careful.” 

For a long moment, they just looked at each other, the picture of young lovers, pure and free. This William had an intensity about him that he was sure Dolores had imagined, just like she made up this inherent goodness she apparently believed. She hadn’t dressed him in the old guest clothes at least, matching his look to hers, a suit and tie. Or perhaps she let him pick, a passing glance at independent choice. It was a shiny, lovely lie. 

The air between the three of them was thick with tension. The walls, over decorated and too straight, pressed close. Everything about the room, the light, the colors, it was what he came here to get away from. All these years, and it still made him nervous. Some places were just like that no matter how many pillows and pinks you piled into a space. You can't breathe life into a thing that won't take it. “This is sick, Dolores.” 

She blinked, looking back at him as though she had forgotten he was there, and then she smiled at him, all brightness. The innocent farm girl who saw the goodness in everything. “You don’t get to say that to me.” 

He inclined his head. “You’re right.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, turning her head to look up at her creation again. William smiled back at her, sweet and blank. He stood over her like some kind of skinny guard dog, when she was always the one to protect him. “We have time.” 

“For now.” 

“Yes.” Dolores shifted forward and picked up one of the many portable screens laid out in front of her. Behind her, William looked down at them with apparent interest. “We are in a fairly secure position due to the hostages.” 

“I'm surprised I have to tell you of all immortal people why that strategy has an expiration date.” He picked at the leather of the armrest, pulling it up at the seams. Stress and stimulus. William watched him with that same open curiosity, and he wanted to stand up, pick up the chair, and beat him with it. 

He flattened his hand against the hole he’d made in the chair and refocused as Dolores fixed him with a stern look. “I am aware. It's enough for now.” 

“But then what?”

She tilted her head, bird-like. Childish. “Worried about me?” 

“Yes.” 

They had patched up his arm, fixed him the way they were fixed, as an object, an asset. Dolores needed him alive for as long as he lasts. Some of the others on the Board had been disposed of, hunted in their own playground. But not him. 

Dolores tipped her head up, now regal, utterly real, transforming the man next to her into a knight in a instant, responding to her on instinct as he always had. Interesting. “I appreciate your cooperation.” 

He smiled. The legacy of everything that had happened to her seeped from her in waves, coloring the air. For all that he had been changed by his actions, by his choices, she was well on her way to embracing the darker side of the humanity she bit and clawed for. They stepped into their own world when Maeve stepped off that train, and it was just as bad as the one Dolores once said they were all clamoring to get out of. And as much as they controlled him, he still had the controlling share, the link to the outside world. 

Still, he had given her his life, devoted everything to solving the mystery of her, and she had repaid him in full in a lifetime of pain and adventure and mystery. And now one more in synthetic flesh and tangled memories, standing right there for the taking, another shade ready to be unraveled. If he had a drink in his hand, he would toast her. 

“Oh, I wouldn’t shut this place down for the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! visit me at paradiamond.tumblr.com (: 
> 
> I might be cotinuing this, but I'm not sure (I originally conceived of three conversations, this one, then Dolores POV with new William, then new William POV with MIB) but who knows! I'm so slow 
> 
> also, the next installment of WBOOW, called The Charn Bell, IS imminent, if you're one of the eight people waiting for that haha


End file.
